Dark Demon
by Relala
Summary: A series of moments in the life of dark! Carlisle Cullen. •OOC•
1. Blemish In The Tissue

**~ blemish in the tissue ~**  
Carlisle/Edward. **T.** 391

* * *

Carlisle felt his body become lead, as unmovable as the heavy stone they used to pave the London streets. He struggled against the evil blood, silent as a ghost, thinking about the world just outside his reach; about what his father must be thinking. His mind was teeming with questions that simply swirled in circles inside his head, returning again and again to the same place.

It was a horrible and hopeless process. He had no answers, no idea as to what he had become. Not a clue as to why his veins flowed with the agony of fire instead of blood.

He shouldn't be thinking about it. It only made the fire hotter, fiercer, when his mind wandered upon it. It sizzled in his fingertips, burned his eyeballs, and scorched his heart without mercy until he was sure it would burst.

But Carlisle was a man, and a very self-controlled one at that. He clamped his mouth shut while the pain flowed onwards. It was like nothing he had ever felt before, not even on those nights... Those nights when his Father, weary and drunk and preaching what he did not practice, raised fist and boot to his son.

Agony. Pain. Torture.

But _eventually_, finally, the pain stopped.

And Carlisle opened his eyes to a new world, one so different from what he was used to that it dazzled and amazed. He was hidden in a cellar full of rotting potatoes, blood covering where his wound had been, and everything was beautiful. Everything was beyond that...it was..._celestial_!

And then the smell.

It lit the sparks of the vampire inside of him, and the thirst scorched his throat like he was trying to swallow a knife. He was, like any newborn, _starving_.

He had caught the scent of a large man. Powerful by all human standards. But not, of course, by Carlisle's. He yanked the man around like a ragdoll with one hand, watching the human thrash like an animal. And suddenly the newborn saw the human as such. Simple prey. Food. Nothing more.

He froze as soon as Carlisle's fangs hit his jugular. And then there came the sounds of voluptuous sucking. He tugged and tore with his mouth muscles, making the blood run fast and hard. It filled the newborn up, made him stronger a blemish in the tissue.

* * *

**first draft**: _10-11-08_

**revisions**: _1-4-10_ **&** _6-25-12_


	2. Surgical Precision

**~ surgical precision ~**  
Carlisle/Edward. **T.** 387

* * *

The boy was dying. Almost dead. Almost. His heart, still so young in his seventeen-year-old body, beat like a rabid drum. It refused, like a child's will, to give up. To give in. And it kept fighting.

But still, he was dying.

The influenza fever blazed inside him. It made his emerald-green eyes blaze as only eyes before death shine. The vomiting had come and gone and come again and now disappeared, but his stomach was weak from it. Empty. The headache made his head pound like his heart race, and he raised his hands to his temples. But, just as he did so, the muscles spasmed. The boy was in so much pain it was heart wrenching...and yet he was still so beautiful. So...weak. Feeble and faint as only the easiest of prey could ever be. And Carlisle felt his mouth water; only it was his own venom he tasted.

The boy would die. It was inevitable, he told himself, which was true. Not even his mother, who had only died hours ago, could have saved her son. Even with the strength and courage of the youthful adolescent, the young man was doomed.

And so Carlisle told himself it did not matter.

Just another dying child in the sea of a thousand dying men and women. Just another body to try to cure, a mouth to feed, another soon-to-be-dead whose bones would not even merit a proper grave.

He would be thrown, chucked, into a mass burial of naked limbs. His clothes being sold or given to those who needed them, he would be desecrated at every turn.

He placed the beautiful dying boy on one of the few rolling stretchers and brought him to the morgue. No one noticed that he was still faintly breathing. There weren't enough hands, enough eyes for that. In these times, it was hard to keep track of half the patients.

And then they were out the back door, flying quickly out into the night, zooming past buildings and people, and rolling landscapes with the wild animals on which he usually fed—but not tonight. Within a small matter of minutes they reached Carlisle's lair.

He cradled the youth down to the dirt ground of his floor, and in utter abandon he gave into his vampiric desires. He pulled the offending sweat-soaked shirt off the boy and ran fevered eyes over the young chest, before shoving his nose into the skin and inhaling the scent. He kissed the boy's cheeks, and worked down to placing frenzied kisses over his throat until, with swift surgical precision, he pricked the jugular with his fangs.

He sucked the sweet virgin blood greedily, only too eager for a thrill. Only too eager to get release from his human chains...and perhaps that was why he never noticed. Didn't even feel...or later, remember...when his venom injected into his prey.

He hadn't meant to make the cherub.


	3. Gluttonous Adoration

**~ gluttonous adoration ~**  
Carlisle/Esme. **T.** 329

* * *

Carlisle had lived for more than two centuries. He had seen civilizations fall, religions die, medical miracles created, and monuments rise that would last longer than his existence.

But nothing he had seen had ever compared to her.

Esme. It seemed the name could have been a whisper from an angel's lips, so beautiful was she. He tested the name with his own mouth, rolling along his tongue like the finest of summer honey. It made him swoon every time he said it. Esme.

It echoed repeatedly in his mind, making Edward roll his eyes. Edward, who was so annoyed with his father, so jealous of the girl. He could not bring himself to be around either, though he had offered his assistance like a proper gentleman should before he had run off quicker than light. Leaving both of them behind...

It was shameful, but Carlisle could not _really _care about his son. Edward would be back soon enough. And besides, nothing existed for him in this fragile moment in time but the wounded girl, the woman who had jumped from the cliff after losing her baby boy. Esme.

It was like she was a raincloud, come to obscure his vision. Esme. She was a disease, a potion to ensnare all his vampiric senses. Esme. But more than anything Carlisle thought she was _his_. Simply his.

He could already see the little changes that he had made in her. Sweat matted her caramel hair to her pale forehead—that was becoming lighter by the moment—her limbs moved in spasms as the venom continued to spread though her.

Carlisle wrapped his arms tightly around her small, somewhat still human, body and buried his nose into her hair. She was so perfect, so pure, so compassionate. Esme—all he might have searched for throughout the centuries, had he ever known what he wanted.

And he felt, in the depths of his soul, a cruel selfishness.

She was his. His Esme.

* * *

**first draft:** _10-11-08_

**revisions:** _1-4-10_ **&** _6-25-12_


	4. Mental Hysteria

**~ mental hysteria ~**  
Carlisle **T.** 276

* * *

A ringing voice, as loud as a clap of thunder, filled the empty hallway just outside Carlisle's study door. But the hallway was just that. Empty. No human or vampire was to be found within the entire Cullen home. Just him and his imagination.

The house is empty. Hollow. As vacant as a giant spider's web whose unlucky victims have all been devoured; long since finished by the eight-legged monster which hid among the walls somewhere.

Carlisle thinks of his past that way...a sprawling and glittering web of steely silk, stretched widely across the limits of his centuries-old life. A deadly trap, this web. How many flies has he devoured, murdered? How many pulsing a human fly has he snatched away from the world, how many innocent and unknowing souls has he damned to Hell?

He trembles, terrified.

Half-familiar images burn the backs of his once-not-so-golden eyes. Bloody faces and mangled bodies...his victims. Men and women, boys and girls. Edward. Esme. The people in his mind were human once upon a time; so alive and naive it broke his tender heart to know now what he had done. Why hadn't he cared before?

He places his beautiful face in his slender hands as his body begins to shake uncontrollably and he lets out a ragged sob of regret. His eyes burn with gleaming tears he cannot shed. So many sins he has committed; sometimes it scares him that he can get away with it all. From the hallway, he thinks he hears another sound...

It is cruelly sweet, the ghost of adolescent laughter.

They have come at last, he thinks, to mock him in his pain

* * *

**first draft:** _10-11-08  
_

**revisions:** _1-4-10_ **&** _6-25-12_


	5. Clinically Marbles

**~ clinically marbles ~**  
Carlisle **T.** 570

* * *

Carlisle wonders sometimes if he won't wind up like the patients he has treated in the past centuries, the centuries before the terms _heath care _or _disability _were even invented. He pictures those people now inside his head-human faces with vacant eyes and rambling mouths-memories to haunt his tender golden eyes with gleaming nightmares. They would be reduced to bone—if not dust—by now, of course, those mortals who wandered in the time when Edward and Esme walked as humans, hearts beating within their chests.

Those people who he supposedly "helped" by having them hidden away in dark cellars which could not be considered more than filthy dungeons. They were filthy cesspools with locks and chains, damp ground and no light. Holes filled with the insane, the disturbed, the distraught and anxious. _(And perhaps even the damned, though_ _what right do you have to throw stones, Carlisle, when you live within the thinnest of glass houses?)_

For a moment he thinks of Alice. Alice who is downstairs cleaning, Alice who is humming softly, her soprano voice thrumming gently through the walls. His precious Alice..."…stuck in that black hole of a cell for so long…" and he shivers in distress.

He glances upwards, towards the Heavens, silently crying out for help. How can there be forgiveness on the other side, when you have slaughtered so many on a mere whim, claiming it was for the victory of good? A dreadful fear took root within his unbeating heart.

"Fear is the heart of love," Carlisle whispers, making the sign of the cross.

He imagines the paint peeling off the walls to show stone towers. The floor boards moulding underneath his feet, the windows clouding with more than just bad weather. The room becomes dark now, dark and filthy...just like any dungeon or asylum from the old days.

"I'm off!" Alice sings, her voice bouncing up the stairs as she dances out the door. He imagines he hears the jiggling of metal keys and the clinking of a lock. She has locked the door behind her, and he is doomed to remain in this rotting tomb for all eternity.

_And I shall die at last__,_ Carlisle thinks. _Die like all others before me._

Placing his face within his hands, the vampire begins to whisper his last prayers. _"Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one."_

Carlisle realizes, suddenly, that this is how it must end for him. There could be no other way, really. He freezes within his seat, his body becoming as still as stone. Unmoving, unchanging, forever. His body does not rot, it is not diminished into ashes…but nor does it function. He becomes like a statue of some Greek God; as still as stone and as unfeeling as the air.

The vampire's last thought, his last dream, was that his conscience-all his thoughts and knowledge-was a marble. A marble which tumbled from his cold hands and rolled across the dirt of the grimy floorboards, slipping under the doorway and plummeting down the drainpipes where it could no longer be retrieved.

There is no absolution in the darkness.

And if there is a God, he never knows.

* * *

**first draft:** _01-27-09  
_

**revisions:** _1-4-10_ **&** _6-25-12_


End file.
